Insurance companies have a great interest in predicting the claims cost of an insured vehicle. The mileage of the vehicle is considered a useful predictor of claims cost, and is commonly estimated through odometer readings. The duration of time spent traveling at unsafe speeds can also be useful for predicting claims cost, but it is infrequently recorded.
The current methods for estimating mileage and speed suffer from several defects. One approach is to install a device into an On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) port on a vehicle thereby enabling direct acquisition of odometer and speedometer readings continuously. However, such OBD devices prone to accidental removal, can drain the vehicle's battery, and can be costly to build and operate.
Furthermore, use of a vehicle's odometer or speedometer can result in significant error. For example, overestimates of mileage based on an odometer can be 5-7% too high. Furthermore, an error or bias in an odometer reading results is a progressively greater divergence of the measured mileage from the distance actually traveled. There is no legal mandate for odometer accuracy in the USA. The European regulation is ECE-R 39, which mandates ±10% accuracy; a proposal to improve this to ±4% failed as “not practically feasible”. Speedometers are relatively more accurate, but tend to overestimate speed, resulting in significant error in estimated usage of a vehicle using the speedometer reading.
GPS-enabled smartphones typically provide a more accurate measurement of distance and an estimate of speed, but require that the smartphone be present and operating consuming power.
There is a need for a new method and device to estimate mileage and speed while avoiding limitations of previous techniques.